


Good for You

by CPericardium



Category: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Animal Abuse, Depression, Gen, friendship?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26675746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CPericardium/pseuds/CPericardium
Summary: taylor small pastel horse friendship tale
Comments: 5
Kudos: 63





	1. i. what you find

**Author's Note:**

> Familiarity with MLP is not required.
> 
> This story is intended to have no quotation marks, but some people found it too difficult to parse so I added them to the Ao3 version. Read the story as intended [here.](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/good-for-you-worm-mlp.885521/reader/)

The Monday after her mother was taken off life support, Taylor found a pegasus being stoned to death by a group of schoolchildren.  
  
The last bell had rung hours ago. She had long since abandoned her usual route and was instead traversing a twisted gravel scar, a path steadily taking her further and further away from the Boardwalk. She’d seen children with backpacks clustering around a rock-strewn patch of road, heard them screaming in their pitchy little-boy voices, and had wandered over in search of excuses not to go home.  
  
The pegasus wasn’t dead. Yet. It lay curled up on its side, spasming like a sprayed beetle, its limbs raised to protect its head. Had it not been for the hooves and the ears, Taylor would not have identified the animal as equine, much less the beast of myth. Its coat was a buttery yellow, slowly purpling, its mane was pink, and its proportions were unlike anything Taylor had seen before—cartoonishly oversized head, narrow chest and barrel flaring into wide hips and rear. Then there was the pair of feathered wings folded at its sides…  
  
Taylor shuffled closer, the children only barely parting to let her through. Another handful of clues pointed to the animal being domesticated, as well as female: the brushed coat, the shorn fetlocks, and the long, lush pink mane and tail that were styled to curl at the tips. It had dragged its mane down flat over an eye, but left exposed one rounded cheek and a sweetly tapered snout smeared with a moustache of drying blood.  
  
"Don’t touch it!" one boy shouted. He had a sharp rock in his hand. His eyes were sharper, blazing with intent to kill.  
  
"It’s a monster," another added.  
  
Contempt surged up in Taylor’s chest, dark as bile. It was the warmest thing she had felt all week. All year. Her mouth wrenched itself into a snarl.  
  
"You’re monsters," she said.  
  
She threatened to call the authorities, hoping they wouldn’t demand proof of a cellphone that she did not possess. Against all odds, they believed her. With her freakish height and drawn face and deadened stare, she must have seemed very grown-up. They scampered off to find the next excitement, and Taylor was left to examine the cowering creature by herself.  
  
She dropped to a crouch. The animal flinched, the knobbled joints of limbs rippling like marbles beneath her thin coat as she shielded herself from Taylor’s gaze. Something shiny curved around the animal’s slender neck. It was a golden collar inlaid with a dull pink gem cut in the shape of a butterfly. It looked more like expensive regalia than a trinket one would buy for a pet.  
  
The animal—the pegasus—peeked out from under her pink curtain of mane. Enormous eyes with green-blue irises gleamed wetly at Taylor, straining wide enough that she could see the fine web of vessels surrounding them. _Don’t hurt me_ , they begged.  
  
Taylor took her home.


	2. ii. what you touch

There were exactly two carrots in the fridge, and both had spoiled. Taylor fished the slimy vegetables out of the refrigerator box before sticking her arm back inside to bob for apples.  
  
One left, but it was _green_. The worst flavour of apple. She’d have to make another trip to the store or leave a grocery list for her father on the counter. His weekly shopping record was spotty, but at least he never questioned any item she put down. He was probably just glad she cared enough to still consider some things necessities.  
  
Taylor stood up and peered over the counter island.  
  
The pony was attending to the bowl of tap water Taylor had set out on the floor. She’d been too nervous to go near it at first, preferring to crouch in the narrow niche between the cupboard and the television set, but now she was lapping at it thirstily enough that water splashed over the sides.  
  
That reminded Taylor: second order of business was to give the pony a bath. Her coat and hooves—which, oddly, were the same colour as the coat—were streaked with grime, and the bruises beginning to bloom across her barrel didn’t bode well. The longer Taylor waited to clean and dress her wounds, the greater the risk that they’d get infected.  
  
She gathered bathroom supplies and unwound the dirt-lipped backyard hose from its reel, a strange household artifact that had been untouched since her mother’s brief and ill-fated gardening phase.  
  
The pegasus followed her out into the yard, watching, waiting. Hopefully the neighbours were at work.  
  
Both of her haunches, Taylor had observed, were adorned with a triad of distinctive pink blotches—manifesting not just in bizarre twin port-wine stains but also in the colour of the hair on her rump. The marks resembled fuzzy-edged butterflies, or inkblots depending on one's perspective. Taylor decided that while Flutter was a little on-the-nose for a name, especially with the collar, it would be less embarrassing than calling her Rorschach. In any case, it was just a placeholder until she came up with something better.  
  
After she'd adjudged the water pressure low enough to wash Flutter without hurting her, Taylor hosed her down. The pony sat obediently, perfectly motionless, shedding hairs and blood and other detritus she’d picked up from trotting around outside. Taylor squirted a liberal amount of Ocean Breeze shampoo onto the pony’s back and took her time lathering her up. Coat first. Then wings. The pony didn’t protest at these ministrations, not even when Taylor bathed her cuts and her hands nudged her bruises.  
  
But the pony didn’t relax, either. Every time Taylor ran the dishcloth over Flutter’s back, her hair seemed to rebel against its very grain.  
  
Water drenched Flutter’s down feathers, turning them stringy, but droplets wicked right off her primaries. Taylor compensated by scrubbing harder, massaging soap into the gaps between filaments. The pony blinked froth out of her eyes and gazed at her wings like they were foreign appendages. She would not open them.  
  
As she started on the mane, Taylor’s fingers traced the intricate patterns engraved into the clasp of the collar. She wasn’t sure if she should take it off. The thought had crossed her mind, that Flutter might be a parahuman with a shapeshifting ability, or one that was locked into this form as a result of powers. Like the lizard-boy and metal-man she’d seen on the news and cape celebrity magazines. It would explain the intelligence, and perhaps even the equine behaviour if the power affected brain function. If the necklace had anything to do with that—and the unfamiliar symbols on on the metal certainly suggested it—she’d be wise not to interfere.  
  
The butterfly gem sat in the centre of the collar, flawless as it had been when Taylor found her. Water and foam alike slid right off it as though repelled. It was inexplicably warm to the touch, and never stopped being warm, like there was an invisible internal mechanism feeding it heat.  
  
Then Taylor noticed that Flutter was humming against the hand that rested on her withers. A moment passed before she realised the pony was shivering.  
  
She was about to grab a towel when suddenly, almost instinctively, the pony buried her muzzle into her left wing to nip at her damp feathers. She worked away at them for a while, still mute but for the breaths that rattled through her, which sounded like they were grazing every rib on the way out.  
  
Taylor paused to wonder at this. This was a living creature she was taking care of, a breathing generator made of muscle with a heartbeat and a brain, and it could feel cold and pain, and it responded to her touch—it responded instantaneously and powerfully to even the most minute flickers of attention and changes in environment. Nobody had told her that this was what it was like to be connected, to be two warm bodies moving in tandem, guiding each other from step to step.  
  
Flutter must have noticed Taylor had gone still. She jerked her head up, before ducking shyly to cover her face with her hooves, and Taylor felt something open inside herself.


	3. iii. what you have

Ponies didn't technically have fur. But Flutter’s coat was so soft and silky, to call it ‘horsehair’ felt blasphemous. Taylor’s hand moved to scratch behind the pegasus’ big fuzzy ear, the way she’d seen her neighbours do to their border collie. 

Flutter’s reaction was more dramatic than a simple twitch. She twisted away from the contact immediately, face seizing up, eyes screwing shut, as though Taylor had grabbed her face with both palms and squeezed.

So she didn’t like that. Noted.

Taylor tried it once more, carefully this time, telegraphing the gesture with a bent finger. She received the same response and gave up. Pegasi weren’t like dogs, apparently.

She didn’t know what she was supposed to do, now. The essentials had been taken care of—food, water, bath, sleep. If Flutter had been a puppy, Taylor would've been playing with it already or teaching it tricks. Flutter had spent half an hour that morning watching an endless stream of ants creep across the windowsill, and another half an hour nosing a dead carpenter bee around on the floor of the basement. Yet she couldn’t spend two minutes alone with Taylor without wigging out.

Taylor tried taking her outside, after her father had left for work. She’d reasoned that being back in an open and relatively green space would make Flutter more comfortable with her, and it worked. A little. 

Flutter investigated the old tree in the front yard, the one with the branches that grew over the fence into the neighbours’ rose bushes and often garnered her father threats of unsanctioned pruning—not always of branches. She sniffed at the gnarled bark, and cast her wide gaze up at the skeletal black fingers crisscrossing overhead. Her wings quivered but didn’t open.

"There’s nothing up there," Taylor said. 

Flutter looked at her, then, through her long curled lashes. Her big eyes looked sad.

Flutter didn’t want to go to the bathroom, didn’t seem to even consider it when Taylor motioned towards the roots by her feet. Where were the food and water going? Maybe pegasi didn’t excrete, and the rear orifice was decorative. Maybe they just metabolised everything, _inside_ , like Teletubbies. 

_Pegasi._ Taylor caught herself circling back to that nagging possibility. As though there might be more than one. 

She blinked up at the sun. She was going to be late for school.

ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ

Classes blurred past. The desire to be back with her pony was a kind of humidity in the air, and she had to struggle not to drown in it the same way she usually struggled not to fall asleep. Her idle graffiti doodles of herself and Flutter reclining on clouds veered off her notebook pages and onto her desk more than once. 

She finally escaped and was about to make her premeditated dash from academic hellpit to locker to exit to pony, but hit a snag when she ran into a certain pretty red-haired girl by her locker.

"Hey Tay," Emma Barnes said. 

Taylor balanced her backpack between the locker and her knee and unzipped it. "Hi," she said.

"I didn’t catch you yesterday. My schedule sucks so bad," Emma said for the umpteenth time since school had started up again. For anybody else, the complaint would have merited a lean against the neighbouring locker. But Emma refrained, because Emma never leaned or slouched or did anything with her spine that didn’t belong on a runway.

Taylor nodded her acknowledgment, pulling books out of her backpack and stacking them on the metal shelf. She double-checked that she hadn’t taken her notebook out with her textbooks. She’d accidentally done that last week, leaving her bereft for a whole day.

"How are you?" Emma inquired. "Did you see your mom?"

Taylor hadn’t told her. "Okay," she replied, not looking up from her backpack. "And yeah."

Emma reached out and smoothed Taylor’s matted curls. Tucked a strand of hair behind Taylor’s ear. "Do anything fun over the weekend?" she asked.

"No."

"Well, what did you do?"

"Read."

"You know," Emma said, "you used to use bigger words."

"Sorry."

"Don’t apologise, goofus. Just, like, tell me things. I wanna know what’s up with you. Gimme the goss. I promise I won’t yawn." Emma prodded at Taylor’s wrist. "How’s Mr G, is he still irritating?" 

Taylor shrugged. "Same as usual."

"When are you going to just report him?"

"You can’t report a teacher for assigning group projects."

"You can if he always lets low IQ bitches piggyback off your hard work. In fact, why don’t we get together tomorrow and teach them a lesson. Julia Swanson and Marianne Ortiz again, right?"

"Think so."

"Low. IQ. Bitches. I’m sure Blackwell will be very interested to learn just how many of those dog years were spent selling cigs to middle-schoolers. Or we can get a little more hands-on, raid a few sanitary bins— "

"Drain a few pigs?"

"If that’s what it takes to get you outside."

"I don’t really care. My grades are fine."

"You know, you used to go full-on rage mode when you got an A- on a book report. I had to convince you it wasn’t even going to touch your GPA, but you were always on about the principle of the thing—" 

This again, Taylor thought. Constant allusions to this third-party stranger who used to do things. Sometimes when Emma got especially animated retelling an anecdote, Taylor experienced a twinge of jealousy towards the interlocutor—alien as they were in body, in chemistry, in thoughts she could no longer imagine having and emotions she could no longer remember feeling.

"—even when the book was something totally crappy like _Madame Bovary,"_ Emma went on, and sighed theatrically. "Well, somebody has to take Julia and Marianne down a peg. If you aren’t going to, I shall be forced to act on your behalf."

"Okay," Taylor said.

"All aloney on my owny."

"Go ahead."

Emma arched her eyebrows at her, her expression a cocktail of good-natured exasperation and genuine weariness.

Emma was not a callous person. She simply believed that people were in charge of their own destinies. That belief was written all over the way she strutted the corridors like Winslow paid her to be there, the way she had their peers filing applications in triplicate just to sit within shouting distance of her at lunch. She’d once explained to Taylor that pop culture had oversimplified the concept of the high school social hierarchy; she’d asserted that that brand of rigid thinking, that jocks had to be popular or that nerds had to be unpopular, was why some people were losers and always would be. Emma rotated and warped that pyramid on a regular basis, toying with the balance of power through meticulously curated relationships and the strategic circulation of choice rumours. Throughout the chaos she herself stirred up, she kept a handhold to climb back on top with regardless of whatever mask she wore that week. 

To her the future was something you could sculpt to your liking: you could carve away the parts that didn’t satisfy you, cut out anything and anyone that inconvenienced you. You could do this at leisure, chipping and shaving and polishing, until you were left with the gutted core of what you _really_ wanted. And what she wanted, she’d concluded, was for her childhood best friend to rule at her side.

Taylor had never accepted this, but she had never rejected it either. She couldn’t fathom having that level of control over what happened to her. If her future was just a hunk of meat, it was long past its sell-by date, and she’d only ever been able to scrape at it with blunted fingernails before it was forced down her throat.

She thought of the pegasus waiting for her. 

"I should be getting home," Taylor said. "Dad will worry."

Emma rolled her eyes. "Well fine, be that way. I have to go too anyway. Wards stuff, you know the drill. Call me tonight?"

"Sure." Taylor rooted around for spare syllables. "Definitely."

ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ

The basement reeked of urine when she got back. 


	4. iv. what you speak

Taylor had left the lights on while she was at school, but the pony was still huddled in a corner like a phantom hand was crushing her against the baseboard and holding her there. That morning’s newspapers lay spread across the floor, soaking up her accident. 

Taylor’s nostrils flared at the pungent smell of bleach. This was unsustainable. She could not keep a pegasus in the basement. Not only was cleaning the floors difficult because of whatever material they were made of, but she’d also run up the electric bill— which her father would notice eventually. And she couldn’t just leave Flutter by herself in darkness for hours at a time. That would be torture.

She considered getting a lamp. Battery-powered, so it wouldn’t have to be plugged in. Money wasn’t a massive issue at the moment—her father left a little pocket cash out for her every day, and she had saved up quite a bit, courtesy of the underrated and low-risk financial strategy called ‘Never Buying Anything’. However, that would mean having to go out and buy it.

Taylor kneeled, trying to coax Flutter out from her corner. 

"Are you Omelas?" Taylor asked softly.

Flutter looked up at her, ears flattened against her head.

"Because I'm walking away."  
  
Taylor made an exaggerated stride toward the door, hoping Flutter would follow, but she only seemed to shrink further into her mane.

"If you come out, I’ll take you for a walk," Taylor promised over her shoulder. "A proper one. You liked going outdoors, right?"

Flutter blinked slowly. She rose to shaky hooves.

Taylor sucked on her teeth. Could she do this? Could she, blithely and in broad daylight, stroll through Brockton Bay with a yellow pegasus in tow?

She might, she decided, be able to get away with a yellow horse.

Taylor picked out her baggiest hoodie, a dark green affair with a stylised white neutron logo splashed across the back. Some science fair souvenir that Emma probably made fun of her for keeping at one point. She could tell at a glance that Flutter’s hooves were too broad to fit through the openings of the sleeves. A fabric scissors took care of that; the hoodie became a vest that she wrestled over Flutter’s head. It was a snug fit, especially over the wings, but it wasn’t as though she was using them.

ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ

Flutter took off across the park lawn, galloping full-tilt towards a big black dog.

People identified themselves as cat or dog persons, but Taylor lacked the frame of reference to make a judgement either way. Rarely did she get the opportunity to get close to them. Her father was allergic to pet dander and so had never kept them. Her grandmother’s cat was always out hunting or contributing to the population of strays in the neighbourhood. The rescued collie next door had been trained to be suspicious of strangers, and its hackles went up whenever it spotted her passing by. 

Fleas and coarse fur, bared teeth and spittle-flecked jowls—this was how Taylor knew canines. This rottweiler was no different.

His owner, a broad-shouldered brute of a teenage girl with cropped auburn hair and a jacket with a fur-lined collar, narrowed her eyes at Flutter. Taylor had no clue why such a skittish pony would gravitate to this frightening dog and his even more frightening owner, but she suspected a death wish was involved.

"The hell is that thing," the girl said. Every word sounded like a threat.

"A horse," Taylor said. 

"Why do you have it."

"She’s my—my service animal."

"What service?"

"When I don’t have her with me, I get heart murmurs."

The girl squinted further at the vest, but accepted the answer.

"Keep it away from Brutus," the girl said, "if you want it to keep its face."

But Flutter would not be kept away. The presence of the dog had catalysed a transformation in her. All her shyness evaporated as she bounded towards Brutus and greeted him like an old friend.  
  
Brutus perked his ears to high alert. He gave her several good hard sniffs. Then he opened his jaws, bowed his great head, and dragged his wet, meaty tongue across her nose.

A nicker tumbled from Flutter’s throat, vibrating, dense with emotion; her eyes shone with an inner light to rival the sun. She nuzzled Brutus’ jowls first, then his neck, coursing downward to the heavy stock of his frame. He reciprocated with muscular licks and needy whines.

Watching them, Taylor was gripped by a raw and terrible sense of envy. Of _injury._ It wasn’t just that Flutter didn’t grant her the same affection. It was that theirs was not a language Taylor had heard before or spoken, but it felt like a language she had forgotten anyway. There was no fairness in the world, if dogs and winged horses meeting for the first time could speak a secret tongue to each other and be understood, when Taylor couldn’t even understand the one she’d known since birth anymore. Flutter was a mythical creature, a divine being, a child’s storybook fantasy born of stars and lightning. Yet she belonged here more than Taylor ever could.

The butterfly gem on Flutter’s collar had come alive—a faint glow pulsed gently within its mineral heart. Taylor looked up to see if the other girl had noticed this too, but she was met with an expression of cold disgust.

"I told you people I didn’t want to be fucking recruited," the girl said.

"What?" Taylor asked. 

"Call off your minion."

"She’s not—" 

"Call it off or it dies."

Taylor had learnt that Flutter didn’t respond to babytalk and beckoning fingers. "Flutter," she said. "I think that’s enough."

The pony didn’t seem to hear her. Forelegs wrapped around the dog, she buried her muzzle into the orange ruff of fur on his chest. He snuffled into her mane in turn. His docked tail wagged furiously. They were utterly immersed in each other, surfeiting their senses on a platter of new smells and tastes and textures. 

"Flutter, come on," Taylor said urgently. "It’s time to go home." 

She was ignored again. The girl took a step forward, her body language radiating menace. Taylor planted her hands onto Flutter’s haunches to try and haul her away. Flutter froze, locking up, and a warning growl emanated from Brutus. He snapped at Taylor’s hand, but she yanked it out of reach in the nick of time.

"See what you did. You and your _service animal_ agitated him," the girl said contemptuously. 

"She wasn’t hurting him," Taylor insisted.

"Fuck you it wasn’t," the girl said. "If I find out that it did something to him, anything, I’m going to find you and I’m going to put my fist through your skull." 

She whistled for the rottweiler to follow her. He obeyed without a fuss, but there was a perceptible tension to his leash as she led him away.

"See," Taylor said, "what you did."

Flutter watched them go, the fur on her cheeks, muzzle and forehead glistening with dog saliva. The butterfly gem went dark.


	5. v. what you are

On Wednesday, Taylor didn’t play with Flutter at all. She brushed her mane, she filled her a bowl of tap water, and she fed her a bouquet of grass and flowers uprooted from her neighbours’ garden, but she left her locked in the basement.

She didn’t see a reason to go to school, so she took a sleeping tablet from her drawer. When she woke up again, she didn’t see a reason to get out of bed, so she took another tablet.

She woke up from that. It was time for school again, but she knew with logical and unshakable certainty that if she left her room she would die. The ceiling and the four walls and the mattress were the only things protecting her from the void of sky.

She could hear the patter of her father’s footsteps as he paced outside her bedroom door, his voice a worried but subdued murmur on the wireless landline; she thought she could hear Flutter downstairs scrabbling in the dark alone, terrified out of her mind. But there was nothing Taylor could do from here even if she wanted—she had been swallowed whole and was only just realising it. All these sounds were merely the thready gurgle of a bolus being passed through insides, and her body was just the flavourless residue that lingered on the regurgitated bones.

The only pills remaining in her drawer were prescription, therefore useless. Instead she got down on her elbows and knees to retrieve the heart-shaped cookie tin collecting dust under her bed.

Inside was a folded letter her mother had once taped to the inside of her Alexandria lunchbox on her first day of elementary school. She opened it and studied the writing without reading it. Her mother’s strokes were solid and deliberate, embellished with serifs instead of curlicues—more architecture than calligraphy. It was a script for making wry corrections in the margins of college essays, for composing the rough drafts of pulp sci-fi novellas in longhand. It was completely unlike Taylor’s spidery scrawl, which she maintained was very legible but that she had been repeatedly marked down for in elementary school. It took practice to get right.

She fetched her finest stationery, then lined the letter and a sheet of quality watermarked paper up side by side on the floor. With a fountain pen, she copied her mother’s handwriting on the blank sheet.

 _Taylor is very sick today,_ she wrote. _Please excuse her from everything._

Her thumb brushed against the last word, smudging the ink. Taylor had to start over on a fresh sheet.

The second ‘n’ in her mother’s signature was a little crooked. Taylor started over.

The nib pressed into the paper so hard it tore. Taylor started over.


	6. v. what you are

On Friday, Mr. Barnes stopped by Winslow to pick Emma and Taylor up and send them to their weekly extracurriculars—Wards training for Emma and therapy for Taylor. 

She couldn’t get out of it. Ever since the therapist had called to report that he had seen neither hide nor hair of Taylor for two consecutive appointments, Mr. Barnes insisted on walking her up to the building himself and taking the elevator up with her to the office. He was paying a sizeable chunk of the fees, and like all his investments, he had to personally ensure it was turning a profit.

The therapist had not been informed of Taylor’s mother’s passing. Or he had, and was slyly feigning obliviousness while he asked Taylor questions about how she was keeping up with homework and whether she had any new hobbies. 

Taylor thought about how it was a shame that he was a fully licensed psychiatrist who had worked for his PhD only to now be paid to sit in a windowless yellow room and make small talk with a teenage girl who got sad sometimes but wasn’t even interesting enough to be deemed a Danger to Herself and Others. He could have been cajoling asylum patients away from electrical sockets, or helping the police profile serial killers, or making high-production-value video essays to post online and enlighten millions about the top ten most misunderstood psychosexual disorders, but for some reason he had fallen into this. 

Taylor said that she was petsitting for her neighbours. He asked her what that was like, and she said their collie was cute.

He asked her about her relationship with her father. She responded that she was Uncomfortable Answering That Question, like he’d said she was perfectly free to do, but what he really meant was that he was perfectly free to keep asking until she stopped being uncomfortable. He wanted to know if they ate meals together, if they were spending quality time together, if they were speaking again on a variety of topics including but not limited to the persistent vegetative state of Annette Rose Hebert. His sympathy felt like a weapon being thrust at her at different angles, seeking weaknesses in her posture, in her expression, relentless until it had pinpointed and unveiled the seething black nexus of innermost grief he imagined must lay hidden inside her. 

Taylor knew the truth, as she had from the start: He was wasting his time. There was nothing there.

So she stayed silent, the air going dead around them both. He told her she was putting up walls again. 

She wanted to tell him that the only reason she perceived any kind of wall between herself and other people was because he had illustrated it in the first place—literally, in the chicken-scratch diagrams he’d drawn for her on his legal pad during their first session over six months ago. _This is you and this is your family and these are your friends and all of_ this _is wellness and can you see that this circle is preventing you from reaching that goal._ She could not forget how carelessly he had scribbled that hairthin line around the stick figure that represented herself, as though everything in her way was a length of twine she could snap or limbo under with enough effort and willpower.

But she didn’t tell him this, and it didn’t matter because he just nodded and sat back and cleared his throat and said that he could see she was getting upset. He told her that being frustrated was understandable, even warranted; however, such emotions were negative mental frameworks that sapped energy from the present. She needed to focus on getting better. She needed to MEND. Medication, Exercise, Nutrition, Dialogue. He had her recite the Wellness Mantra six times, as penance.

_I want to mend. I want to mend. I want to mend. I want to mend. I want to mend. I want to mend._

Then the hour was up. He thanked her for coming, and gave her more worksheets to fill in when she told him the dog had chewed up the previous stack.

ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ ᙙᙖ

For that night and the nights after that, Flutter shared Taylor’s bed. 

She’d decided it was worth the risk of being found out. Her father didn’t enter her room without knocking, anyway. She would have time to stow Flutter somewhere and throw some laundry over her. 

Flutter wasn’t very large—considerably smaller than a pony without wings, even—but she still occupied more than half of Taylor’s bed. When Taylor joined her on the sheets, she lay almost on top of her, her cheek against Flutter’s soft neck. Her hand roamed idly over fur, careful to circle around the injuries. 

Even after a week, the bruises over Flutter’s body were still purplish-black and the scratches were still raw. No scabs had formed, and the hair had not regrown. Taylor had tried disinfecting and bandaging them earlier. Whenever she gave in to impulse and checked underneath the bandages, she found the wounds weren’t bleeding, swollen, or leaking pus. They just weren’t going away. 

Flutter stared straight ahead and didn’t move, not even to adjust her wings. Her breathing sounded taut next to Taylor’s ear. She was still afraid, Taylor realised with a pang. Not without reason.

Taylor apologised for the way she’d been neglecting her. She explained that she had been angry at Flutter, just a bit—but it wasn’t her fault. All that Flutter had done was illuminate a blank page inside Taylor, one that had been erased when she was sleeping, one that was sandwiched between so many other blank pages. You couldn’t fault a flashlight for what it caught in its beam.

At that, Flutter turned her head and met her gaze. Taylor didn't think she could comprehend her words, but somehow she _knew_ the pony could sense her emotions. When Taylor looked into her beautiful turquoise eyes she saw a love so real, so pure, so endless that she lost herself in its oceanic depths. It was animal empathy, simple and unconditional, and Taylor could not get enough of it. She only had to decide whether to take it slow, or dive in headfirst. 

As she whispered to her, deep into the night, she continued to stroke Flutter's flank and feathers. Now and again she would apply too much pressure, and a quiet squeak would escape the pony’s lips. 


End file.
